Routledge rides alone

by Will Levington Comfort

Jerry Cardinegh was still alive—lost to wars, lost to friends, but still alive. He was close to death, his brain probably already dead to big things, and he had not told! Noreen would never know. Routledge tried to be glad. All his praying, hiding, and suffering had been to save her from knowing. His lips formed a meaningless declarative sentence to the effect that he was glad; meaningless, because there was no sanction in his heart. He was ill and very weary. He wished it were time for the prophesied wound, and for Noreen to come to him. He was not powerful enough that moment, walking back to the Bund, to face the future, and hold the thought that he was to remain an outcast....

“She will come to me when Jerry is dead,” he repeated, and for the time he could not fight it.... He went aboard, forgetting dinner, and dropped upon his berth. The Sungkiang put off, out into the river, and long afterward lifted to the big swell in the offing. These were but faint touches of consciousness. His mind held greater matters—the strength of her hand, the breath, the fragrance, the vehemence, the glory of the woman in the wintry dusk, as she rushed back to her work—the tearing tragedy of parting; again the pitiless mountains of separation....

Loose articles were banging about the floor; the pendent oil-lamp creaked with the pitching of the ship. It was after midnight. Routledge caught up the great frieze coat and went out on the main-deck. It was a cold ruffian of a night, but it restored his strength.

She would keep her promise and come to him, when her father was dead. He faced the thought now that she would never know the truth; that Jerry Cardinegh would have spoken long since, if he could.... In some deep dark place of the earth, she would find him; and some British eye, ever keen, would see them together—the lady and the outcast.... He would send her away—put on a martyrdom of frost and steel—and send her away.... If he lied, saying that he wanted no woman—she would go back.... But Noreen was to find him wounded, fallen. Might he not, in delirium, utter the truth that her father failed to confess? No, the human will could prevent that! He would go down close to the very Gates with his lips locked.

“... I shall take care of your life for you—even in the Leper Valley!” Routledge thought he must be mad to imagine those words. Her face—as the words came to him—had been blotted out in the snow and the dark; yet it was her voice, and the words rang through his soul. She could not have seen Rawder nor the Hindu. They were lost in Northern India. He knew nothing of Jasper having passed the hut in Rydamphur that night, nor of his meeting with Noreen on ship-board. The Leper Valley, hidden in the great mountains of Southern China, was scarcely a name to the world. Could Noreen have heard the name, and used it merely as a symbol of speech for the uttermost parts of the earth? This was the only adjustment of the mystery upon a material basis.

He fought it all out that night in the icy gale on the main-deck of the Sungkiang, and entered upon the loneliest, harshest campaign and the bleakest season of his life.... Often it came to him with a great, almost an overpowering surge—the passion to look into the eyes of Noreen Cardinegh again and to stand among men, but he fought it with the grim, immutable fact that he had taken her father’s crime and must keep it, stand by it, with his dearest efforts until the end. If fate destined some time to lift the burden—that was resistless.... Except in bringing in his stories to the cables, he passed the spring and summer in the deepest seclusion.

This he knew: if he were seen by any of his old friends among the English, the word would be carried to Jerry Cardinegh, who, if still alive, might be stirred to confession. To save Noreen from this was the first point of his sacrifice. If her father were dead, unconfessed, and word reached her that the outcast had been seen in a certain part of Manchuria, she would come to share his hell-haunted-life—a thought which his whole manhood shunned. Moreover, if he were seen by the British, the sinister powerful fingers of the secret service would stretch toward him; in which case, if nothing worse happened, he would be driven from the terrain of war. Work was his only boon—furious, unabating, world-rousing work. God so loved the world that he gave unto poor forlorn man his work.... No more loitering on Bunds or Foreign Concessions for Cosmo Routledge.

From various Chinese bases, he made flying incursions into the war-belt for the World-News—a lonely, perilous, hard-shipping, and hard-riding service, but astonishingly successful. It was his flash from Chifu which told New York that the war was on before the declaration. This was on the night of February eighth. A strong but not a roaring west wind brought Togo’s firing across the gulf. He chanced a message and verified it before dawn by an incoming German ship, which had steamed past the fortress when the Russian fleet was attacked.

Again, he was with the Russians at Wangcheng before the port was closed, and got the story of the Yalu fight. This through John Milner, the American consul at Wangcheng, in whom he made a staunch and valued friend, regretting that it was necessary to do so under the name of “A. V. Weed.” Milner was an old World-News editor, a man of stirring energy, and strong in the graces of the Russians at his post. He was ardent to serve all American interests, and the World-News in particular. He presented Routledge to General Borodoffsky, who told the story of the battle; and there was a fine touch in the fact that the general wept as he related the Russian defeat. The story proved more complete and accurate than any which the correspondents with Kuroki managed to get through the Japanese censor. Kuroki’s great losses by drowning were for the first time brought out. Borodoffsky declared with tears that the future of the war must not be judged by this battle, as the Russian defeat was due entirely to an error of judgment. Routledge was leaving Wangcheng with the story when two British correspondents arrived. This prevented his return. The Borodoffsky story was filed in Shanhaikwan.

In a sea-going junk, the third week of May, Routledge crossed the Liaotung Gulf, hoping to get into Port Arthur, which was not yet invested. Instead, he stumbled onto the Nanshan story. From the northern promontory of Kinchow he caught a big and valuable conception of this literatesque engagement of the land and sea forces, and returned with it to Chifu for filing.